Brazil Road Trip 2018

By Mr. 848days - July 29, 2018

For many years, my family and I had always wanted to take a road trip in Northeastern Brazil to explore the region but for one reason or another we were talked out by our Brazilian friends living in the United States for safety reasons. But on this trip, after consulting with a local Brazilian friend living in Salvador da Bahia, we decided to proceed with our road trip with the following rough agenda:

4 Nights in Petrolina, Pernambuco

3 Nights in Campina Grande, Paraíba

3 Nights in João Pessoa, Paraíba

5 Nights in Reserva do Paiva (between Porto de Galinhas and Recife)

​Overall, our road trip was uneventful and we really had a blast visiting these wonderful cities. I want to provide the following tips in the hope of helping others plan their first time road trip in Brazil. It was the planning that helped to ease my concerns with the road trip for my family.

Plan your drive routes ahead of time and use Google Street View to examine the roads and surrounding neighborhoods. Once you're on the interstate highway or Federal highway, the road condition is very good. Interstate highways are labelled as BR-XXX on the map. For this reason, stay on the interstate highway as much as possible and even take the longer route, if necessary.The state highways are not always in good conditions, the roads tend to have potholes with no lane divider for drivers as seen on my trip video below.

Plan your time accordingly and always drive during daylight unless you're familiar with your routes. Be mindful of some of the local roads and state highways where there are no barrier dividers and unpaved roads. Making this even more dangerous is the fact that people are driving very fast in both directions and always tried to pass you even in zones that are not allowed. Stay focus and don't feel under pressure to speed up.

Preload your Google MAP or Apple MAP ahead of your trip as there will be almost impossible to get a cellular data connection, see below write-up on cellular services.

Be prepared to turnaround if you're heading in the wrong neighborhood instead of heading deeper. This happened to us just outside of the Recife airport on local roads and we immediately turnaround to take the long way toward our destination.

Finally, in regard to money, it is best to use your credit card with no foreign transaction fees. This gave me the best foreign rate, comparable to the market rate at ~3.88 reais per dollar during our trip. With ATM such as 24 Horas, you can withdraw a maximum of $R1000 and with inter-bank fees, I ended up getting ~3.54 reais per dollar. But I think you can withdraw multiple times per day but we did not try this. Credit card usage in Brazil is safe as they usually require a pin. As such, they will bring the machine to you only to realize that our credit card does not require one. Have fun in Brazil and stay safe!

On Cellular Networks and WhatsApp:

My T-Mobile One plan offers unlimited texting and data in Brazil from T-Mobile USA with voice call costing 20 cents per minute. This is really great. I was able to force select my desired network operator from one of the big 4 operators (Vivo, TIM, Claro, Oi). I had tried all four operators at the airports (Sao Paulo, Salvador, Recife), beaches, and around urban cities. Unfortunately, my user experience is really poor across the board. Most of the time, my data services are very slow and at times not usable causing my apps and web access to time-out. Cellular data services are bursty and your access will compete with other users. As more and more users overwhelmed the cell towers, data rate slowed to a crawl and ultimately causing poor user experience. Cellular networks in Brazil have not kept up with the increased user demand with capacity upgrade and keeping up with the industry trend. Brazil also does not support VoLTE (Voice over LTE with IMS framework overlay) which serves as a path to migrate 3G to 4G completely. Without VoLTE support, the operators are forced to continue to operate both 3G and 4G networks indefinitely. The 3G network is needed to support voice calls as the 4G network is purely for data services with CSFB (Circuit Switched FallBack) to 3G network to handle voice calls.

In general, I had better luck with Vivo and Claro as TIM and Oi are very popular but most of the time Claro is my preference. At times, I get better services on the 3G network over the 4G network. This is because there may be more users on the 4G network vs. the 3G network. WhatsApp is a great communication tool from Facebook. It is a wildly popular app in Brazil where everyone is using it to give out their number from individuals to businesses. To workaround the poor cellular networks, users are using Whatsapp to send short text messages and short voice conversation recording between user or group of users. It is not very popular in the United States but around the world there are 1.5 billion monthly users. Those that use Whatsapp in the United States, are using it to communicate with families, friends, and businesses overseas.

About Mr.848days

Mr.848days is an engineer for a leading American technology company. In his spare time, he enjoys weight training, stock market investing and option trading, traveling, and spending quality time with his beautiful family. ​